02 Apr 2023
Rev Peter Crumpler, associate minister at St Paul’s Church in Fleetville, compares the two major Christian festivals.
If you had to make a choice between Christmas and Easter, which would you choose? And, some would say, is it really that much of a contest?
Christmas is about a baby boy being born in unusual surroundings after a long trek. A mother cuddling her new-born, while visitors come to see the baby and bring gifts.
It’s an easily-understood story played out in many families across the country. What better than a new baby to make people smile, brighten the mood and make everyone feel more optimistic?
Easter can be a whole lot darker. It’s about that same baby, Jesus, around 30 years later, being put on trial, tortured and executed. He dies in excruciating pain, and darkness descends.
When it comes to important Christian festivals, Easter can present challenges. Despite all the special services and events at the Cathedral and in churches across St Albans, the real meaning of Easter can be difficult to communicate. Especially, when Easter eggs and bunnies were never part of the story.
The cross on which Jesus died on Good Friday has become the symbol of the Christian faith. But the best bit of the story is that Jesus comes back from death – rising to life again.
Yet you can’t have the gain, without enduring the pain. Jesus had to die, so that he could rise again.
Jesus suffered, and that means that God understands suffering. God understands pain. Whatever situation we find ourselves in, God understands it. As Jesus, God was brought up as a child, grew into adulthood, challenged the authorities of his day and was betrayed by a friend.
That means God understands so much of what we may be going through, because he has been through it too.
It’s tempting to rush past Good Friday. To look past the suffering and death of that dark day, and head towards Easter Day, to find the empty tomb and see Jesus raised from the dead.
But it’s better to take each day slowly. To appreciate the pain of Good Friday. To stay with that pain, and to consider the suffering of so many people in today’s world. To understand that God stands with those people in their anguish. To stay with Holy Saturday, the day when Jesus’s family and followers mourned their loss, the death of their beloved Jesus.
To wait, to inhabit that loss, to feel their numb suffering. Just as many bereaved families and people are today experiencing loss. And only then to move to Easter Day, to celebrate on that Sunday, the new life, the new beginning,
the new dawn that breaks with Jesus’s resurrection. Coming back from the dead to bring new life to all those who put their faith in him. A new start, free from the past.
Christmas is about new birth. So, in its way, is Easter, with the resurrection offering new hope, new life to everyone who puts their faith in the risen Christ.
So I wish you a Happy Easter.
